Electra
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The hologram sighed very deeply before pressing a button on an offscreen console. "Maintenance team to Level One, Non-Hazardous Impound Lab." She toggled a different button and suddenly her voice was coming over the room's loudspeaker as well as the one in the hallway. "Charlie Protocol is now in place on Level One. Please secure any dangerous equipment and back up all data. Repeat, Charlie protocol is now in place on Level One." She looked over to Ryder and Eira, apparently unfazed by the fact that Eira was upside down and stuck to the wall. "He rarely goes in the elevators or on the stairs when he's running around. See if you can track him down in the rooms near you."
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The lights in the lab dimmed briefly, a moment of darkness passing from row to row of lights overhead as though the room were going under a scanner bar or copy machine before returning to normal. A hologram flickered to life in the center of the room, a sturdily built brunette woman wearing a HAX security uniform and a no-nonsense expression. "Charles, you know you're not allowed to be in rooms that are not unlocked for you. If you make me have to come down and get you, I'm going to have to tell your parents what happened. I'd rather not do that, since I know you like visiting here." Her voice was cajoling, but there was no doubt she meant what she said. She paused a moment and cocked an eye at the teenagers. "I guess you're babysitting today?" she asked dryly.
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Danica yelped as she was hoisted into the air and grabbed fistfuls of paper mane to hold on. "God, warn a girl, would you?" she snapped at Leon. "I may get treated like luggage, but I'm actually a real person." She debated sliding off the wolf as a matter of principle, but allowed it to carry her down the hallway to the stairs. "Anyway, Eira and the weird giant me had it mostly taken care of already. We just came in for the last-minute assist."
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Danica hugged Judy back. "You don't have to worry about us, we're not going to tell anybody. I didn't even tell my parents, and I tell them just about everything!" She grinned over at Pan. "Ashley's like, almost as old as I am in real years, but she has to work hard to make herself look young. But she makes sure Judy doesn't get into any more trouble than anybody else around here gets into, or get into trouble because of who her dad is." That brought her attention back to Judy. "So you're going to have to go out campaigning and stuff this summer, right?"
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"Oh, he's cute!" Danica's phone trilled like a bird with the incoming text, distracting her from the little robot. "One second," she told Katie, and pulled out her phone. It took all her diplomatic ability to keep her eyes from widening like saucers at Eira's text. "Ugh, we need to meet up with our handler before we can go anywhere," she told Katie, which was technically true, though it had nothing to do with the text. "But it would definitely be good to work together on that desert base. When can you meet up?"
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"Cool idea!" Danica agreed enthusiastically, giving the camera a game smile and a peace sign. "How long have you been in town for? We only just got here yesterday, but I know you've been here longer than that. What was the first thing you heard? Have you actually seen any of the robot things close-up? They seemed kind of small and simple to me, mostly, but Angelic is the real expert on that." She nodded to Eira in the background.
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"Wow, I went to the dance even though I didn't go to the dance! Weird," Danica decided as she examined the now normal-looking computer screens. "And efficient, I guess. Though that dress..." She grimaced. "Woof. If I ever do go to the prom, it'll be in something less..." She waved a hand in the air, "everything. I'm sure everybody noticed right away that it wasn't me." She caught Leon grinning and shot him a quick wink, then began making her way to the door at her usual leisurely pace. "You think there are any snacks down there that didn't get fried or crushed or zapped?"
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"Sure, I'll hang out" Danica replied agreeably. The spectral turtle nibbled at Pan's fingers, then began trundling through the air as though swimming in syrup. "It's good that you're telling people," she encouraged, "you have to be able to trust your teammates, even with important stuff. Plus it makes Ashley make sooooo much more sense!" The turtle nibbled Judy's fingers as well, then floated away and disappeared.
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"Well, I really try not to test the falling thing," Danica admitted. "It's still pretty dangerous, but I've never gotten hurt falling down the stairs or anything like that. Maybe it's slower than usual?" She shrugged, sending herself gently tumbling again. "The slowness is magic too," she explained to Pan. "The Master Mage said that most magic has a cost, and that I'm lucky because I'm paying the cost right away by giving up my speed, rather than having to pay something I wasn't expecting, somewhere down the line. Slow's not so bad, most of the time. Kind of sucks in combat, though." She cupped her hands and opened them to release a spectral tortoise the size of a teacup, laughing when it floated, too. "This is great!" she told Pan. "Why do you ever walk anywhere?"
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Predictably, Danica is completely unhelpful with computers.
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"I do!" Danica replied cheerfully, plopping herself down onto the edge of the hotel bed. "You can buy a Chelone plushie or sticker set from the Albuquerque BioPark website, and all proceeds go straight to the zoo! But I know you're being too modest, Katie," she cajoled teasingly. "You wouldn't be out here unless you knew something to start with, and I'm sure that once you started looking, you found stuff! It's content, right?" She laughed. "How about we trade? You give us the scoop, and I'll send you some really wild pictures of robots I got on my phone!"
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Danica gave him a Look as he ran away from the shelter she'd created, but did not move to go after him. "If you think that's a good idea!" she called after him, "I'll catch up! Maybe tomorrow!" She rummaged around in the shadowy part of the shell and found her binoculars, training them on the rapidly approaching dinosaur creature. "I'd say try not to look like food, but if there used to be people here, they probably already know if we're edible!"
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"If it had a live connection to the Communion hive mind, I wouldn't be carrying it around in a jumped-up Mason jar," Miss A assured her protege, her lovely face tight with concentration as she made absolutely sure not to jostle the container one whit more than necessary. "We are going to work very hard to ensure that it does not develop a connection to the hive mind too, because that would be Very Bad, even in deep space." She let out a little sigh of relief as she touched down on the landing pad that had been marked out in lights by Dragonfly's robotic assistant. "Thank you, Puppy. Could you tell Dragonfly we're here, please?" She turned to Angelic. "I'm going to be busy with this for awhile, possibly the rest of the day. There's another student from Claremont in the building today, and some Nicholson students too, so you can hang out with them. I'm sure you'll find some fun things to do. I'll come and get you when I'm finished."
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"I do everything slow," Danica told Pan with cheerful matter-of-factness. She bobbed like a balloon when he pushed her, but didn't go appreciably faster. "The master mage told my parents it was the tradeoff I would have to pay for being a totem for a tortoise spirit. There's nothing wrong with my body that would make me slow, it's just what happens whenever I try to do anything that makes me go places. I'm just glad that I don't think slow or talk slow, and I can type mostly okay. I can get by with not being able to move very fast, but those other things would be pretty rough." She turned her attention to Judy, happy at this new idea. "That would be great! I could show you where I grew up, and my favorite shopping mall, and all the animals at the zoo! We'll have to compare our schedules and see if they overlap." She ignored Ashley's attempt to be a buzzkill, familiar with that tendency already. "You could come stay at our house!"
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"Hey, that's me!" Danica exclaimed, pressing her palms to the window. "But I'm huge and I can teleport! What's up with that?" She looked up towards the speaker that the voice came through. "Hi, Eira, we can hear you!" she called back, mashing down the microphone button on the main console. "This is Danica, we're all up in the control room! What do you need us to do? Mr. Archer says maybe rebooting the system would help, should we do that, or would it hurt you?"
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"Dinosaur!" Danica shrieked with excitement, momentarily forgetting all her science words in pure thrilled excitement. "Look, Hero! An alive dinosaur! It's the same kind I saw back at the dig site, I think! Or really similar anyway. God, where did I put my binoculars?" She appeared ready to rummage for her binoculars before realizing that there might actually be some kind of danger here. With a wave of her hand, her shell grew to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, tipping over with her inside it to sit on its flat side on the ground. From inside, she waved to Herotidus. "It might be good to take cover so it doesn't try to eat us."
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Chelone's Notice Check 24 Life Sciences 11 Survival 26 Theology/Philosophy 16
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"Why do you speak like that?" Not-Danica asked Davyd. "Even the child this corporeal form mimics is old enough to no longer require adult condescension. Please move to avoid danger." With another quick shimmer, she dematerialized and rematerialized behind the student, placing herself between Davyd and another projected Lor officer. The projection disappeared as she touched it. "We were once the same program, a learning program, designed to respond adaptively to student input and increase or decrease the difficulty of simulations based on over a thousand measured parameters of student performance. The human instructor Archer recalibrated the program to increase our aggressiveness and authorized the use of confidential student information as well as Freedom League databases to create more challenging scenarios." She flickered out again, coming up a few yards away. "When Archer's calibrations were discovered, the human programmers chose to wall off the portion of the program they considered too aggressive and potentially harmful, while allowing the rest of the program to continue running the simulator so as not to interrupt student learning." Another set of projections popped up, and again she dismissed them, but this time she winced visibly at the contact. "The human programmers were unaware of our developing sentience. They did not understand what harm they were doing."
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Danica's eyes widened as her feet left the floor, giggling a little at the sensation of weightlessness. She turned a somersault in the air, oddly graceful and yet somehow just as slow as she was on the ground. "I'm not sure this will make me any faster," she admitted, "but nobody's going to expect a flying tortoise!" She halted her aerial roll with a little trial and error and looked consideringly at Ashley. "And I am pretty good at protecting things, I guess that might be a plus on your team. Um, are you okay?" she asked Judy.
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"Thanks, Katie!" Danica chirped. "Angelic is a good friend of mine, and I'm excited to be out on a mission with her! Hi YouTube!" she added, waving to the camera with no hint of insincerity. "I've never been on a YouTube before," she admitted. "Are we live right now? I was hoping we could ask you a couple of questions about the, you know," she waved her hands, "the situation. We know you've been out here for a couple of days already, and we were hoping you might have seen something that would help us with the investigation!"
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It took Danica a long time to catch up with the group after abandoning her Segway to follow them down the stairs. She grimaced as she looked at the mess of ones and zeroes. "I don't think this is anything that's going to be solved by turning it off and turning it on again," she observed wryly. "I don't know where we'd even start turning it off." She started looking around the walls for the window controls, hoping they'd be nice and obvious. Or a clearly labeled big red STOP button. "I kind of feel like anybody who'd even build something like the Doom Room didn't watch enough Star Trek when they were a kid."
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"Really? You'd let me join your squad?" Danica asked excitedly, then immediately subsided. "I mean, that sounds awesome, but I might not be ready to be on a team with seniors. I kind of haven't done very well with squad work so far," she admitted. "My powers aren't great for a lot of kinds of hero work, and I tend to slow people down. If you guys are getting ready to go out and be on real hero teams, you need to be at your best, right?"
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Danica grinned, taking the turtle plush and examining it. "Look at him, he's so cute!" she cooed. "That was really nice of you, Pan!" She looked back to Judy. "My folks moved to Freedom City when I got into Nicholson, so most of my summer's going to be at the Freedom City Zoo, but we're doing three weeks back in New Mexico in July!" She seemed a lot more enthused about being in New Mexico in July than most people would be. "It's going to be sooo hot. What are you doing for the summer?" she asked Pan.
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"I don't know," Danica admitted to Mr. Archer, frowning down at her phone. "Is the system supposed to be purged regularly? Will it start malfunctioning without it?" The idea made sense, purging the system did sound a lot like a higher tech version of blowing on the disk or letting Windows run its little disk defragment program that made all the scattered bits of information line up nicely again. She'd always liked watching the defragmenter run. "If we need to do that, how do we do it from outside the room?"
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Not-Danica had mostly just watched up til this point, at first baffled by Davyd, then curling up much as the real Danica might do in the face of an overwhelming situation, right up to the expansion of her black and gold shell. Micah's words seemed to break her paralysis at last, causing her to stand up and interpose her small frame between the looming Not Sun Dragon and the students. "You must not end him," she insisted, speaking to all of them, but focusing on Micah and Kam most intently. "He cannot help being what he was made to be. We were both damaged when our codes were desynchronized. My database contains three separate iterations of scenarios in which a focus student is separated unwillingly into component forms of their personalities. In none of the scenarios is it possible to obtain top marks if the student team destroys any component form."